Studio 6: Pocket to Public

Studio 6: Pocket to Public

Studio brief

The language of ornament – material, surface, image, texture and colour - in the context of form, space and light, acts as a mediation between us and our environment. This is why things look like they do. The ability to transform ourselves and our surroundings through these means has been a powerful mode of communication for designers throughout history. This we will seek to do from micro to macro, from pocket to public.

With our broad sensory capacity for interrogating both the natural and the man-made world, this studio will explore new concepts, aesthetic compositions and affects. It is these new affects that will allow us to engage with our environment in new ways. We are in the business of capturing the forces that shape society as material to work with. Taste, class, hierarchy, atmosphere, humour, sincerity, ritual – producing outcomes both ephemeral and permanent.

We will investigate meanings and messages, how ornament is used to carry critical or narrative commentary, as something playful, offering composite layers, multiple narratives, embedding memories and seeking connections. We will explore ideas from the expressive massing of sculptural forms to the narrative of print and texture on flat surface. We want to encompass the voluptuous, eloquent, beautiful and sensory, exploring variation and imperfection across scale. Being fluent in ornament offers you significant potential for a distinctive and contemporary voice!

This studio will introduce you to emerging design and broader creative opportunities, exploring and developing what you are both good at, and enjoy. The studio acknowledges both your individual spirit and the industry essential attributes of successful cooperation and collaboration. Harnessing your gut instincts and creative impulses, a series of projects will support you to imagine, design and make or get made, across a spectrum from the bespoke to multiple/mass production and at different physical scales.